Moll Who Wrecked the Government

Bhanwari DeviBhanwri Devi may have signed her own death warrant the moment she dared to blackmail one of Rajasthan's most powerful politicians. For more than a year, political circles, both in Jodhpur and Jaipur, had been whispering about a sex CD that starred Mahipal Maderna, then a Cabinet minister, wearing nothing but his wrist watch, caught in a compromising position with Bhanwri. She was clearly aware of the danger such a CD posed. In a taped telephone conversation that surfaced mysteriously on November 4 this year, Bhanwri is heard saying: "Dono CD Ajmer ke locker mein hain. Main locker ka code bata doongi. Mujhe kuch hua to voh CD nikaal lena.... (Both the CDs are in a locker at a bank in Ajmer. I will give you the code. If anything happens to me, take the CD out.)" Something terrible did happen. On September 1, Bhanwri, the 36-year-old nurse, paramour of at least one former Cabinet minister and another Congress MLA, was abducted.

Officially, she is missing. But hardly anyone india today spoke to believes that she is alive. A fortnight after her disappearance, police sources claimed that she was seen speeding away from Bilara near Jodhpur in a Scorpio in the company of a Jalore-based Bishnoi gang. The CBI was called in a month later. The investigating agencies still have no idea of her whereabouts. Or whether she is alive. Neither have the investigating agencies been able to trace the mysterious gang. They have, however, arrested two people. Sohanlal Bishnoi, a small-time contractor, is the chief suspect. He is the cousin of Malkhan Singh Bishnoi, the MLA from Luni whose decade-long affair with Bhanwri is Jodhpur's worst-kept secret. Shahabuddin, a motor mechanic and a history-sheeter, is also in jail. Bhanwri was last seen with them. Both are goons, obviously acting as hired henchmen at someone's behest. Someone who stood to gain from Bhanwri's disappearance.

Click here to EnlargeThe CBI, which took over the case from Rajasthan Police on October 12, is on the lookout for a third suspect, Sahi Ram Bishnoi. He is believed to be the mastermind behind Bhanwri's disappearance. There were 27 calls from his mobile to both Shahabuddin and Sohanlal on the day she vanished. Police sources also reveal that the GPS on his mobile places him close to Maderna's home in Jaipur when he made these calls. Maderna has also confirmed to India Today that Sahi Ram was at his home on September 1. During the first week after his 'disappearance', Sahi Ram was sighted in Jodhpur. He is still absconding.

Click here to EnlargeWhat has surfaced is the missing CD. On November 10, its steamy contents were aired on local TV channels. The 49-minute CD begins with Bhanwri and Maderna undressing each other. The camera also captures Maderna murmuring, in the royal plural, "We love you" in Bhanwri's ear. Bhanwri obviously knew where the hidden camera was placed. When it is her turn to undress, she strategically steps away from camera range. For the most part, the CD catches her back or shows her aesthetically reclining on her side on the bed. Maderna is not so lucky with the camera angles.

It didn't take long for the amateur CD to become a political thriller. On November 15, widespread moral outrage in a deeply feudal state forced Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot to ask his entire council of ministers to resign. Desperate to set his house in order, the beleaguered Gehlot has reshuffled his pack. If Bhanwri is still alive, she will be smiling, a woman vindicated. For in another taped telephone conversation which has now been made public, she can be heard claiming that "Rajasthan mein Ashok sarkar ka takht palat jayega (This can shake the foundations of the Gehlot government)." She was right.

Bhanwri's fatal mistake could well be her attempts to auction the CD to the highest bidder. Three taped phone conversations reveal that while she was using Sohanlal as a middle man between Maderna and her, she had also asked him to "approach a party in Delhi". Maderna apparently agreed to buy the CD. Sohanlal is heard telling Bhanwri, "I have spoken to Maderna and he is ready to give the money." Bhanwri cautions, "Agar voh samjhau-ta ke liye tayyar hain toh dono CD unhe saunp doongi, nahi toh ek, do, teen (If he is ready for a compromise, then I will give him both CDs, otherwise I will make many copies.)" There is the threat of disclosure if Maderna refuses to pay up. It is a threat that boomeranged on the nurse from Baraunda, near Jodhpur.

If Bhanwri is dead, who killed her? Who leaked the CD and the three telephone conversations within days of each other? Is there a massive cover-up at the highest political level in Jaipur? The questions are reverberating beyond Gehlot's Rajasthan. If Gehlot had asked Maderna to resign the minute Bhanwri disappeared, he could have contained the fallout of the sex scandal. Maderna's name had appeared during police investigation and his affections for Bhanwri were well known.

The youngest of seven children, Bhanwri was born into poverty. Her parents were daily wage workers at the Aditya thread mill in Kishangarh, 25 km east of Ajmer. She studied in a government school till Class VIII when she was married at the age 14 to Amar Chand, a senior secondary student from the rural Baraunda district. It was her father-in-law, a government health worker, who encouraged her to become a nurse. The young Bhanwri was posted in Jaisalmer town in 1999 as an auxiliary nurse and midwife. It was here that she first tasted the power of monetary freedom. Earning Rs 8,000 a month, she spent her money on studio-photographs and roamed the city and its parks, hand in hand with her husband. It was perhaps then that she decided that she wanted more. For herself and her family.

She wanted to be able to send her son Sahil to a decent college in nearby Bhilwara town, and to educate her two daughters Ashwini and Suhani so that they didn't have to live her kind of life. She wanted L'Oreal creams and aloe vera gels. She bought her husband a white Maruti Swift in 2009 so that he could operate a taxi service. In 2011, she bought him an Indigo. She was making what she could with what life had given her. But now her family sees it differently. "Bhanwri was greedy and ambitious," says elder brother Kishore Rajnut, who lives in Kishangarh and runs a band of musicians who perform at weddings. Unlike the CBI, he is using the past tense for his sister who seems to have been done in by her dangerous liaisons.

Members of the Gehlot(left) ministry emerge after putting in their papers."She earned only Rs 21,000 a month as a nurse," claims Chand, seated on a charpai in the courtyard of their pink-and-blue two-storeyed two-bedroom home, adding that she supplemented her income by acting in local music videos. Bhanwri was a good Kathak dancer and responded to an advertisement for a role in these videos. However, he admits that over the last year, she had become tense and preoccupied. She was also clinically depressive and was taking injections for both thyroid and depression. Her husband, however, does not know the names of these medicines. Perhaps worried about her diminishing physical appeal, Bhanwri had resorted to the CD as a desperate one-time lottery. At his home in Baraunda, Chand pulls out a child's copy book from a canvas bag. On every page, he had pasted newspaper clippings about his wife's disappearance. This scrap book and a drawer full of photographs are all that the 40-year-old has left of his wife, in addition to the cars, of course.

He says his wife took the CD with her when she went missing on September 1. She told him that she had a CD "jiske liye koi chup rehne ke liye paise deh raha hai (I have a CD for which someone is ready to pay money)".

Chand also claims that at that time he did not know what was on the CD. He saw it on tv along with the rest of Rajasthan. Their two older children are also aware of the CD. The youngest, seven-year-old Suhani, is the only smiling face in the house. She still believes her mother will return one night to tuck her to sleep. While 15-year-old Ashwini is at a boarding school in Jaipur, the eldest, 17-year-old Sahil, broods in silence. He has not gone out of the house ever since his mother disappeared, "because I don't have the answers to the questions people ask". He wipes his brow with the sleeve of a T-shirt that has a Playboy bunny emblazoned on it.

According to Chand, his wife had told him that she was going to Bilara to meet Sohanlal. "He (Sohanlal) has been visiting us for the last two years," says Chand. "He last came on August 27 and my wife tied him a rakhi," he adds. From both what Sohanlal told the police and what Bhanwri told her husband, Sohanlal had agreed to buy her two-year-old white diesel Swift car for Rs 4.75 lakh, though the market value of a brand new car is between Rs 4.69 lakh and Rs 5.5 lakh. He had already paid her Rs 50,000 and agreed to pay the rest in Bilara, 35 km away from their home. While the Swift was already with Sohanlal, Bhanwri had recently bought an Indigo for her husband. Chand ran a taxi service with the two cars. On that fateful September 1, the Indigo was not working. Bhanwri took the 1.30 p.m. bus.

At 4 p.m. that day, Chand said he called his wife to say that the Indigo had been repaired and offered to pick her up. She declined, saying that Sohanlal would drop her back. That was the last conversation he had with his wife. When she had not returned by 6.30 p.m., Chand called again. "My wife had the mobile switched off," he says. He then tried Sohanlal's mobile. He denied Babloo (Bhanwri's pet name) had met him. By 9 p.m., Chand panicked and went to Sohanlal's house. "His wife said he was out," he says.

That is when Chand sounded the alarm. He went to the local thana in Baraunda to file a missing persons report the next morning at 9.30 a.m. The police officer first said that he should search for her in Bilara before filing a complaint. A few hours later, the police officer called him and suggested that they all go to Bilara and register a complaint. "I called Sohanlal again and said that Babloo had still not come home. He asked me, "Koi Jaat koi kaam toh nahin karay diye ho? (Are you sure no Jat man has killed her?)"

Two days later, on September 4, Umesh Mishra, the inspector general of police, landed in Bilara and began investigating Bhanwri's disappearance. On September 5, fir No. 383/11 was lodged registering a case of kidnapping and Sohanlal was arrested. There was no mention of Maderna.

According to police sources, during interrogation, Sohanlal said he handed Bhanwri to Shahabuddin. Bhanwri apparently knew Shahabuddin as Raju Bhaiya. Sohanlal claimed that Bhanwri went with Shahabuddin and his driver in the latter's Bolero and that is the last he saw of her. Shahabuddin has claimed that he handed Bhanwri over to a group of men in a Scorpio. "He said she knew them and wanted to go back to Baraunda with them," says a police source. This is where the investigation stalled. No attempts were made to join the dots and figure out at whose behest Sohanlal had acted. Interestingly, Sohanlal has a Maderna connection as well. He works as a government contractor in the Public Health and Engineering Department of which Maderna was a minister until recently.

Initially, Maderna maintained that he didn't know Bhanwri. Once the CD surfaced, he admitted the truth. He told the CBI that while he had an affair with Bhanwri, he was not involved in her disappearance. "Having an affair with someone and making a CD with them is not a crime," said wife Leela Maderna, as she stepped out after CBI interrogation on November 11. Her designer glasses covered her real emotions.

Not surprisingly, on November 14, the Jodhpur bench of the Rajasthan High Court pulled up the CBI for being tardy in its investigation. "The CBI asked for four weeks but the court gave them 10 days to inform it about Bhanwri's whereabouts," says Anand Purohit, additional advocate general, Jodhpur. He adds, "Till today, there is no evidence of murder. The police is cooperating with the CBI." The court has also warned the CBI not to let this become another unsolved case like the Arushi Talwar murder in Noida.The CBI has interrogated Maderna twice, and Malkhan thrice. During the interrogation, they even made the two confront each other since Maderna had claimed that it was Malkhan who introduced Bhanwri to him. At first Malkhan denied this; he later admitted to it.

Malkhan's sister Indira Bishnoi, Bhanwri's confidante, has claimed on November 7 that Bhanwri had met Gehlot sometime last year and told him about the CD implicating Maderna. Gehlot has never categorically denied it. "I meet many people. I can't remember who met me and who did not. But Bhanwri Devi informing me about the video tape with Maderna is news to me," he reacted.

Local Congress workers claim that during the initial six months after Gehlot took over as Chief Minister in December 2008, Maderna lost no opportunity to oppose the Chief Minister. But a year later, there was a sudden change and Maderna became compliant. "Perhaps Gehlot was holding the threat of the CD over him," says a Congress legislator trying to piece together a puzzle that continues to confound the Rajasthan Police as well as the CBI.

It was sometime in 2003 that Malkhan introduced Bhanwri to Maderna when she wanted a transfer for a friend. It was the lure of political favours that tempted the auxiliary nurse to more dangerous pastures. There are whispers that Bhanwri had other liaisons but apart from Maderna and Malkhan, no other names have come to light. Chand says he knew of only these two: "A woman does not tell her husband these things. I suspected that she had such relations with these two (Malkhan and Maderna) from her phone calls."

There are allegations that one of her children was actually Malkhan's and that Bhanwri was keen on a dna test. "Bacche mere hain. Yeh mai khud kah sakta hun (The children are mine. I am saying it)," says Chand. This has not stopped the rumour mills. A local businessman claims that during the wedding of Malkhan's daughter, Bhanwri created a scene at the venue, demanding that one of her daughters, whom she insisted was Malkhan's child, should get equal due. If local gossip is to be believed, there were many such scenes, one taking place at a Hero Honda showroom in Jodhpur owned by Malkhan sometime last year. "Bhanwri and Malkhan were known to be a couple. Maderna and Bhanwri were never seen in public together," says a local businessman.

Bhanwri's house in Baraunda reflects a haphazard influx of money. There is a fridge in the courtyard with a small television perched on top of it. Opposite the fridge is a matka (earthen pot used for cooling water). The kitchen has steel utensils but there is a washing machine that is placed outside the bathroom. A treadmill has also found its way to this dusty village surrounded by fields of bajra. An old-fashioned transistor lies by her bedside. "She liked dressing up," says Chand with a smile as he recalls one of his wife's less painful indulgences. In the fir, too, he wrote that she left home in a "brown designer sari".

The Bhanwri shockwaves have reached Delhi. Even before the CD was aired, Gehlot had rushed to the capital at least thrice in the space of three weeks. He met Congress President Sonia Gandhi twice. "He has been given one last chance," says a Congress general secretary. While the Maderna family's influence is limited to a few Jat-dominated pockets of Jodhpur, this is the first sex scandal to rock Rajasthan. Gehlot's government had been charged with corruption and inefficiency. Now sleaze has been added to the list.

Nor is this the only sex scandal. A local newspaper report dated Septem-ber 29 implicated another Cabinet minister, Ram Lal Jat. It revealed that Paras Devi, a woman friend of Jat, had committed suicide on September 27. Jat was in a zilla parishad meeting at his constituency in Bhilwara at the time. He had rushed to the hospital and insisted on a post-mortem that very night. When told that the post-mortem would only take place the next day, he took the body to another hospital but had to return for want of doctors. The post-mortem did not reveal anything suspicious. But the viscera report is awaited. What was suspicious however was Jat's behaviour that night. He resigned on November 12 after a report accused him of more affairs with his officers' wives. He denied the allegations but Gehlot accepted his resignation on November 15.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok GehlotThe first casualty of Gehlot's misgovernance could be Congress's prospects in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh. Since Bhanwri belongs to the Scheduled Caste (SC), the mishandling of the case could impact not just the 60-lakh-strong SC vote in Rajasthan but also in next-door Uttar Pradesh. The Gopalgarh incident on September 14, in which 10 Meo Muslims were killed during a police firing in front of a mosque, has already provoked Muslims. State Home Minister Shanti Dhariwal has refused to take responsibility for the incident that happened on his watch. Nor did Gehlot push for his resignation. The fact that, unlike Maderna, Dhariwal was not axed, has angered both the 60-lakh-strong Muslim community and the 32 lakh Jat vote in the state. Both the Gopalgarh and the Bhanwri incidents impact two communities that the Congress is wooing desperately in Uttar Pradesh.

Gehlot himself is all too aware of this. On November 11, he told the media that "the incident is such that it can give anyone goosebumps. She was a Dalit woman and the way she was kidnapped and the incidents thereafter are horrifying."

{mosimage}The Chief Minister certainly has more than just goosebumps. If he cannot contain the rot, he may be replaced. The Congress leadership already has a succession plan in place. The frontrunner is C.P. Joshi, Cabinet minister and ex-Rajasthan Congress chief. An able administrator, Joshi also has Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi's blessings. Another contender is Jitender Singh, who fits into Gandhi's game plan of a generational change in leadership. Meanwhile, the bjp has scented blood. "The make-up alone can't mask the ugly scar that Bhanwri has left. The Chief Minister must quit to pull the state out of such a shame," says a rejuvenated Leader of Opposition Vasundhara Raje. "You can hold as many meetings as possible with your ministers but the decisions have to be taken by you."

Gehlot is not the only one scalded by the Bhanwri bomb. Already steeped in several scams, the Congress high command has to fight a sex-and possible murder-scandal in one of its most misgoverned states.